Rapunzel
by wildcatt
Summary: And she leads the blind prince home. Nejiten, NOT AN AU.
1. Chapter 1

**Just something to get me back into a writing mood. Should be updated relatively quickly, since each part will be pretty short.**

**_Very loosely_ based around the fairy tale, split into five parts.  
**

**

* * *

  
**

**Rapunzel**

I.

It begins like this:

Team Gai pretends to forget that they are due back in Konoha by tomorrow evening, that the Hokage is expecting them to report on their first A-rank mission at nine p.m. sharp; or rather, Neji pretends to forget. Gai and Lee wax tastelessly lyrical on the beauty of the crooked little stream glinting through the vast wheat field, and Tenten smiles and yawns and shrugs off her pack - "First dibs on a bath."

But the slight flush on her cheeks betrays the collective sentiment: all of them are still giddy from the addictive taste of success after their most challenging test yet, and their relief is as palpable as their pride. They are still too young, like children who, upon the first affirmation of what they always guessed they were capable of, still feel faintly surprised and unbearably excited at the enormity of what they could achieve in the future. The sobriety of routine in Konoha can wait; Team Gai needs one more night under the open sky. (Tenten glances at Neji as she heads for the stream. He watches her steadily while she passes him by, his eyes never leaving her until she is by the water, fingers curling around the top button of her shirt, and when he finally turns away to join Lee and Gai in their makeshift campsite both of them know exactly what it means. )

By the time they are all cleaned up the sun is only a brittle gold gleam on the horizon. The boys make their way back from the stream with their hair still damp and cold against their necks, dissipating the hot adrenaline burn that had continued to drum its way through their nerves hours after the final fight. The darkness is thicker near the ground, trapped by the tall stalks of wheat bristling past their hips. Tenten is a good distance away from the campsite, walking slowly through the field, fingertips trailing along the heavy tips of the stalks.

"I'm over here," she calls out unnecessarily, waving. Lee and Gai wave back at her and loiter cheerfully around the campsite to set up a fire, displaying unusual reserves of tact. Neji regards her silently from a distance while she continues moving out, looking at the pale, lithe lines of her bared forearms in the dark. Then he slowly walks out after her, each step a quiet rustle, and when he catches up there is no hesitation in the way his fingers curl securely around her wrist.

"Tenten."

"Hmm?" She stops; turns calmly; lets him tug her gently towards him. They are both carefully nonchalant about it all, as if this is perfectly normal and they have done this a thousand times before.

"It's nice out here," she murmurs. Her fingers come up to touch his temple. "Does it still hurt?"

"No." He shakes his head.

"You used the Byakugan for far too long," she says. "You know what Hiashi-sama warned you about last time." The danger of putting too much pressure on the delicate nerves around the eyes, the risk of burn out. Temporary blindness; death for a Hyuuga in battle.

"Hn." He doesn't want to talk about that. The fight had been hard and his Byakugan had faltered near the end from the strain of hours of continuous use, but they had come out relatively unscathed, victorious. Right now there are other things on his mind. His other hand comes up to cup her elbow, tracing along her forearm, skimming across her shoulder to the nape of her neck. Her skin is still moist.

"You'll catch a cold," he says. Then, leaning down and quieter: "……..Let down your hair."

She arches an eyebrow. "Why?" It is almost ridiculous, the way both of them are pretending that this new proximity, this physical tenderness they are sharing isn't thrilling them. After all, this has been a long time coming. _How long? _she wonders briefly. Tenten doesn't know when she first started wanting him, when he started wanting her, when the realization of the mutual attraction became something both of them gingerly accepted and cradled between them.

"I like it," he tells her honestly. A deliberating pause. The after-flush of their success has temporarily loosened his inhibitions and makes him bolder, less careful. "Do it for me."

She smiles and pulls out the ribbons slowly, shaking loose her hair. The thick chestnut tresses are wavy from being constantly tied up; he combs his fingers through them, smoothing them out. Her hand comes up to rest on his shoulder and she tilts her face towards his, presses a kiss on the stubble darkening his jaw. "Is that all you want?" she asks softly, teasing.

"No." He draws a quiet gasp from her when he suddenly slides his arm around her waist and pulls her flush against him. "But it's a good start."

He likes the way her laugh feels against his chest, likes the warm friction of his skin on hers. This is how they begin: the kunoichi lets down her hair and becomes his lover, the two of them stranded in the middle of a vast field, hidden from view by the dark. They dabble with love clumsily, like children dipping their hands into a fountain, like children playing with knives; love still feels like a new victory, and they are young enough to believe they can afford it.


	2. Chapter 2

II.

"Another one?"

"Mmm?" She tilts her head lazily to glance at him, sliding her cheek against the softness of the pillow. "Another one of what?"

His eyes remain closed as he lies by her side, one hand resting on the top of her right thigh. His thumb strokes slowly across a small, pink scar that gleams faintly just below the edge of her shorts, rising slightly above the skin and smooth to the touch. "You got burned again."

"Oh. Yes."

He snorts. "Ironing."

"Last night," she confirms, yawning and stretching herself luxuriously out on the bed, enjoying the warm stinging in her muscles as she arches her back, fingertips lightly caressing the wooden backboard above her head. His hand falls off her thigh for a moment; he waits for her to finish and collapse comfortably into the mattress before discreetly sliding it back onto her skin.

"Ironing what?"

"This shirt," she tells him sleepily, tugging lightly at the mandarin collar of her now very crumpled pale pink top.

He smiles. "You've ruined it again."

"Indeed." His breath hitches when she suddenly opens her eyes and grins foxily at him. "A worthy sacrifice."

She had managed to distract him from his calligraphy, after all, pulling away the fabric of his collar and pressing slow, delicate kisses inside the hollow of his throat. (Tenten thinks his calligraphy is beautiful. Tenten also thinks that Neji is beautiful, and even more so.) To his credit, he had managed to resist long enough to complete half the characters of the verse he was inscribing before Tenten had lured him from the table by letting her hair tumble down her back, twirling ivory ribbons teasingly around a finger while making soft, remonstrating noises, a small hand trailing light circles beneath his shirt as they made their way across the room.

The wetted brush is currently abandoned on the nearby chair. Gleaming black drops of ink speckle the floorboards in a wide arc.

"Was it?" he asks with a low chuckle, bemused. "Really?" Neji is the only person in the world who knows that a good number of Tenten's scars had been sustained not in the heat of battle but in the heat of ironing; small, glossy burn marks linger across her skin, testament to the countless times she has mishandled the iron and ended up singeing herself. (Tenten privately thinks that ironing perfectly qualifies as "battle".) In any case, ironing is Serious Business, and the end product not something to be taken lightly or sacrificed so easily.

"Mmm." She responds to his teasing by muzzling her nose against his shoulder and smiling languidly into his skin, pressed so close that the late morning light outlining his profile and the flat planes of his chest become her momentary horizon and all she can see is him, all she can feel is him. "_Definitely_ worth it."

And then she reaches up to swat away the smirk she knows is spreading smugly across his face.


	3. Chapter 3

III.

"You do not use it."

A question. Tenten turns to find Neji looking at her intently. He is leaning against a boulder, one of the dozens that she had sent thundering down the valley barely an hour earlier. The slopes above them are pockmarked by her explosives; pale, soft trenches of exposed earth score the foliage. The missing-nin are corpses crushed by layers of rock beneath their feet. "Use what?"

Neji holds out a hand silently and she moves towards him, letting him draw her closer. The front of his shirt is specked with blood but she leans in anyway, resting her forehead tiredly against his chin.

"This," he says, and she starts when she finds his fingers by her throat.

Tenten wears a loose string around her neck, hidden just beneath the top of her collar. Hung from the string is a tiny rolled up scroll; and within that, tucked tightly inside, a small hilt-less blade with one beautifully fine edge. Neji is rolling the scroll between his fingers right now, feeling the rough texture of the resilient, waterproof parchment Tenten had picked especially for the job. The parchment is thick enough to safely sheath the blade but he can still feel it embedded within, flat and hard and promising clean, quick cuts.

"You've been wearing this for a while," he continues calmly, "but you've never taken it out. Why?" She had started wearing it after a particularly bad mission three months ago, actually, when she had nearly broken her spine while running from an ambush. He remembers the exact date.

Tenten suddenly looks a little apprehensive and shrugs his hands away; he lets them fall to her waist.

"I…..I just haven't had the chance to use it yet," she says lamely.

Silence. Both of them know she is lying. Tenten flushes slightly and feels guilty, because this is the first time she has ever tried to hide anything from Neji and it is all too obvious he's keenly aware of the fact.

What she doesn't realize, however, is that he already understands.

It has been two years since the giddy, breathless excitement of their first A-rank victory. They are two years older now, two years wiser (though never wise enough); they wear two more years worth of scars, ugly proof of missions gone horribly wrong, battles lost. Neji knows that the blade is for herself, for her own throat, and knows that it explains why Tenten is not completely _his; _the one last thing that separates him from her is herself. He rests his hands on her abdomen and finds underneath a fierce pride that tells her: die by your own blade, and no one else's. (It could be pride; it could merely be vanity, or even raw, animalistic fear. Neji is now old enough not to judge.) Tenten is usually a cheerful enough girl, but he tastes the paradox within her whenever he kisses her while she's angry, that carefully honed thread of passion, the feral intuition that underlies each coldly measured aim, thrust and parry, the instinctive self-preservation in self-destruction.

So he takes what he can and tries to be content; and he knows he will spend the rest of his life by her side, making damn well sure she will never have to use it.

"You do not need to tell me if you don't want to," he tells her softly.

And Tenten is almost angry even whilst blinking back tears, thinking _god damn you, Hyuuga Neji, god damn you. _Team Gai had been supposed to be invincible and unbreakable but it is getting so hard, so very hard, and she can't see a clear way out anymore and _fuck it _is it unfair how forcefully he can affect her, how he can be so fearless and strong while she can only feel blind and in need of him.

His eyes are gentle. Tenten becomes angrier, half from frustration with her own need and half from his damn patience, his willingness to forgive her over and over again.

"Stop it," she says, voice tight.

"Stop what?"

"I don't know." She cannot articulate her irrational anger in any sane way. He's leaning closer. She bites her lip viciously, suddenly raising her right hand and covering his eyes with her fingers, thumb brushing against his lower lip. It's a reflexive act, driven purely by instinct and a desperate, childish urge for retaliation; by blinding him she momentarily establishes some degree of control over him, over what he can do to her. Neji stills at her touch like a silent animal. She feels his lashes brush against the underside of her fingers as he closes his eyes. Tenten is breathing too quickly, glaring up at his proximity; his shoulders are taking up most of her vision and she can feel the heat of the air trapped between them, prickling and tangible. The scent of blood reeks from their clothing and skin, coppery on the tongue.

Then he slowly reaches for her, doing nothing to remove her hand from his face and merely pulling her gently closer. His arms slide soothingly across her back until she is pressed securely against his chest, eyes wide, head tucked against his chin. Her raised elbow rests on his shoulder. She does not pull her hand away but she knows what he is saying: _I am not afraid of blindness if it is you who inflicts it upon me._

"Neji," she says achingly, "you are too good to me." And then she reaches her other hand up and presses it over her right, just to make sure that he _really _can't see a thing; and she stands up on her tiptoes and kisses him softly on the lips. Neji will always remember that kiss based on the sensation of touch alone: calloused fingertips curling carefully into his temple, and her chapped warmth in the dark.


	4. Chapter 4

IV.

They're going to kill her. She can't even hear them the rush of blood in her ears is so loud, but she knows they are close behind – too close – and she keeps running and running but each breath is shrapnel in her lungs, and her right leg had never fully recovered from yesterday and oh god she's going to die she's going to die she's going to-

Tenten half runs, half skids down a crumbling slope of thick, terracotta earth, red dust flying into her eyes. The kunai wound just above her hip is still wet, dark blood gleaming through her top. They're too strong, too many. She'd seen the weapons they carried, seen the jutsu ravaged on her partner, her now dead partner, had seen the way his bones had been crushed under the weight of – "_Fuck." _

The ground suddenly disintegrates beneath her feet, crumbling into fine powder that pulsates with foreign chakra. They've caught her. She's –

_"-going to die," his partner tells him, "You lose the Byakugan, you die." _

_"Concentrate," Neji says, "Find them."_

_It's his fault. He should never have split the team up, shouldn't have put her with that new recruit. Their radio signal died nearly three hours ago, three hours for Tenten to get ambushed, get hurt. Lee is back at the camp, ready to run back to Konoha if something goes wrong with both teams. He should have let Lee go with her instead. Neji suddenly clutches at the side of his face, fingers brushing against the throbbing veins of his Byakugan. The terrain is difficult: steep granite mountains, jagged valleys cracked deep into the hard earth, boulders haphazardly strewn in crumbling piles from past avalanches. _

_"Captain," his partner says, "you need to rest."_

_Neji has been using the Byakugan for seventeen hours straight, through the first fight and the second, and it burns his face now as he scans the terrain for any signs of their missing teammates. He brushes the other man aside: "You take the Northwest for the next couple of kilometres, I'll take the Northeast. Keep your signal safe." _

_Tenten, he thinks grimly, she's going to-_

End this, she has to end this, it hurts it hurts it hurts. Her ankle has been snapped. There's no running anymore. Just the red dust, the blood. And death.

Tenten fingers the small scroll hanging from her neck, feels the sharp edge tucked safely within. A surge of relief, warm, soothing: she's going to leave her own way. Tenten can hear them approaching when she unrolls the parchment and takes out the blade. Her eyes are watering from the dust but it glimmers between her fingers with a calming familiarity. Someone has written on it. She blinks, brushes a thumb over the dried black ink.

_Stop._

She can recognize the brushwork straight away. Neji's calligraphy. She can see it all in the single character: his steady hand, his grace, his patience. _Stop. _

Neji, she thinks, Neji, what have you done.

_Stop._

It is not an order. He probably tried to convince himself it is one, yet another of his quiet demands that he knows she unwaveringly obeys out of respect. Don't attack until we arrive. Let a medic take a look at your arm. Get some rest tonight. Wait for us by the border.

But this is not just another move in a battle plan and he is not writing in his capacity as a teammate, a captain of her ANBU squad. Tenten knows he must have realized with each brushstroke that she would only ever see his inked message when she is on the brink of being too far gone, must have known there would be a high chance that she will not, cannot obey.

It is not an order.

It is not even a request. Tenten suddenly feels like she is going to cry because this is the closest that Neji has ever come to begging, because Neji is asking her to _stop, _meaning _please, _meaning _don't-_

"Neji…."

_-leave_

"….you fool."

_-me._

_Neji keeps running. He can see far, far ahead, three hundred and fifty fucking nine degrees, and she is not there. Only earth and rock, dead red dust. Three hours and a half since her signal died. _

_Movement. He twists around rapidly, focuses on a spot a little over two hundred metres to the west. A team of three enemy-nin, heading his way. His Byakugan falters: the world falls in and out of focus suddenly, with a velocity and violence that alarms him. Then again, and again. _

_He rests his eyes briefly, readjusts his ANBU mask. Opens his eyes. The world sways. Focus. _

_Neji closes his eyes again, presses calloused fingertips to the heat of his temples. Focus. They are nearing; he will have to take them on alone._

_When he opens his eyes he is blind._


	5. Chapter 5

V.

Neji kills the first Iwa-nin blind. He can vaguely gauge the enemies' movements despite the collapse of his vision; in the darkness his other senses sharpen like blades, and he moves instinctively to slight tremors in the ground, to the sound of heavy breathing. The first one had lunged in overconfidently, sensing his incapacitation, and Neji had managed to close two of his tenketsu before slashing his windpipe. He had felt the blood spatter onto his ANBU mask and neck, hot and viscous.

The remaining two are warier now. They circle him like vultures, excited by the prospect of taking down an ANBU captain: one of Leaf's finest. He can hear their soft footsteps ghosting in arcs around him, drawing closer, but his hearing is not precise enough to allow him to attack. He refrains from calling for his partner on the radio. Daichi is too far away to help him now, hunting in the northeast direction for Tenten and her partner.

_Tenten. _A sudden fear momentarily paralyses him, cold fingers sliding around his heart and contracting. Three hours and fifty-three minutes since her signal had disappeared. Either her radio has been damaged, or she has moved too far away for reception. Perhaps she had to run from an attack and became lost in the unfamiliar terrain.

Perhaps she is dead.

_Focus. _He snaps smoothly back to attention with a mental discipline that is slightly marred by tightly-coiled heartache. He can hear the unsheathing of a katana to his right, and a few metres to his left foreign chakra is gathering in the earth, pulsing and thick. Abruptly the ground beneath him cracks open in a carefully controlled earthquake, coarse slabs of granite buckling and shattering into a heaving, roiling cacophony of razor-edged boulders and crackling dust. Chakra licks at his feet, hot and chafing, like the rough surface of a cat's tongue. Neji leaps out of the way blindly, hoping he will find solid ground beneath him when he lands.

He doesn't. His ankle is caught in between the jagged edges of two boulders that still thrum with the initial surge of chakra, and he slips, falls forwards. He is already spinning away by the time the katana whips through the air toward his face; he shifts his weight to his hands for support and kicks out toward the hiss of steel slicing through the air. His foot connects with a bandaged calf, hard. He hears the dull crack of a fracture, a harsh expulsion of air: _"Shit, he got me." _The Iwa-nin tries to dart away but Neji is too quick for him, closing the space between them in between inhalation and exhalation, elbows unbending and fingers punching through the air; he closes three tenketsu on his opponent's left side with a blind rapidity, a practiced familiarity with anatomy that remains even when his vision has deserted him. The ground is throbbing again, the rock beneath his feet beginning to crumble into a fine, hard dust. The veins around his eyes are stinging and a dizzying wave of pain washes through his head. _Focus. _He throws a barrage of kunai in the direction of the shinobi casting the jutsu, aiming to delay the onslaught of the next earthquake.

The katana wielder is getting audibly desperate. Neji hears the blade whistling toward his throat and ducks fluidly, listening for the man's increasingly ragged breathing. Chakra slowly concentrates into his fingers, bleeding warmth. The blade is coming down from directly above him now, slicing down toward his head. He can't feel the man's body heat; he is attacking from a height. Where?

Neji shifts to the left, allowing the falling blade to scrape against his shoulder, drawing blood. The connection immediately betrays the Iwa-nin's location, and the man realises too late that he has lost when Neji's hands snake up and stop his heart.

Two down. Neji wavers on his feet almost imperceptibly, the only outward sign of exhaustion that betrays his rapidly diminishing chakra. _Tenten, _he thinks, _wait for me. _Then the ground rips apart with a sickening peal of subterranean thunder, a chasm opening up beneath him like a ravenous mouth, and Neji is falling, falling, down and down and down.

* * *

Tenten grasps the blade with shaking fingers, staring at the inked character painted onto the steel. _Stop._

But it's too late. The enemy-nin will be here in a matter of minutes; she can feel their chakra growing stronger in the earth beneath her, scorching her skin. She is going to die. Better her blade than whatever horror their jutsu will inflict upon her.

_Stop._

Suddenly she remembers the first time Neji had kissed her, out in the vast darkness of the wheat field, the triumph of their first A-class mission still thrumming in their blood. They had been so young. She remembers stroking the veins around his eyes, asking: _Does it still hurt?_ She remembers the way he had looked at her, as if to say: _Not when you touch it. _She remembers his request: _Let down your hair._

_Do it for me._

Her hands come up to trace the ribbons tying up her hair. They had been a present from Neji. Abruptly she tugs them loose, a sound escaping her throat that is half laugh, half sob.

She never had been able to deny the bastard anything.

The twin buns fall into tangled brown curls halfway down her back, matted with dirt and blood. She grabs them with one hand and, with one reckless, fierce swipe, cuts them all away with the blade she had intended for her own throat, leaving choppy strands of hair swinging just below her chin. The thick length of hair is surprisingly heavy in her hand.

She uses one ribbon to knot the strands together, the other to tie the whole thing into the hook of the last kunai she has remaining on her. She can hear footsteps in the distance, muted in the terracotta dust. The Iwa-nin are closing in on her.

Closing her eyes, she grasps tightly onto the knot of hair in her hands, feeding chakra into each strand with such force that she crumples forward. She knows this is her last chance at survival. With her broken ankle a fight with the Iwa-nin is out of the question.

Voices, now. The Iwa-nin are not even bothering with stealth; they know she has nothing left. Gasping with the effort, she intensifies the flow of chakra from her fingers into her hair, feeling herself weaken as the chakra pumps out of her body. She does not stop until she is nearly fully depleted. The strands of hair are starting to singe with the overload of intensively concentrated chakra, scalding her fingers as they ripple with molten energy.

Tenten looks up into the early morning sky, finding her vision blurred by exhausted tears. She twists herself onto her knees, ignoring the brittle pain in her ankle. With the last of her chakra she flings the knot of burning hair high, high up into the sky. Burn marks blacken the inside of her hands.

_I'll be waiting, Neji._

The knot of hair crackles and flares, spitting condensed energy as it arcs through the air. Tenten bites her thumb, breaking the skin, and marks the ground with blood calligraphy.

The explosion is small but intensely bright, an orb of blinding white light burning a hole into the sky near the pale remnant of last night's moon.

Tenten collapses onto her back, watching dazedly as her chakra slowly disintegrates, the knot of hair loosening and scattering, thousands of blazing strands of light floating momentarily in the grey morning sky before drifting slowly back down. She has nothing left. The pain from her wounds settles heavily in her limbs, pulling her into the earth.

Shadows appear in the crest of the slope above her. There are five of them, perhaps, or six, but she can't be sure. Her body is failing her. She hears muted voices in the background as she drifts softly into unconsciousness.

"_They will come for her now. Her teammates."_

" _Is the Hyuuga still alive?"_

"_I don't know."_

"_Hn. Arata will want him. To study his eyes."_

"_Will she be enough? To bait him?"_

"_Maybe."_

* * *

Neji stares at the sky from the deeply cratered earth, his back bleeding, cut open by the shrapnel beneath him. He can hear the Iwa-nin approaching. His vision is still gone, but suddenly there is a pinprick of light in the darkness, as if an explosion had gone off somewhere in the far distance. He guesses that it is coming from the north. It burns intensely for a few seconds, growing in size, before slowly fading away, leaving the memory of light imprinted in his blindness.

_Tenten. _He knows it must be her doing, somehow. He simply _knows. _Tenten is alive.

The Iwa-nin is close now, and then suddenly there are two: a clone. Neji can hear the faint crunch of their sandals on the broken ground. His chakra is low, too low, but he has no choice. He rises to his feet with a swiftness and grace that makes his enemies pause momentarily. By the time the Iwa-nin and his clone have collected themselves sufficiently to begin their jutsu Neji has already slid into position, knees bent, arms raised. His eyes stare unseeingly forwards but his expression is unsettlingly calm. _"Hakkeshou Kaiten."_

When it is all over, the Iwa-nin is crumpled into the side of the crater, body shredded by the shrapnel caught up and flung out by the swirling chakra. Neji had had to cut the Kaiten short, panting and wincing behind his mask, but the man is dead all the same and he can finally move on now, keep going, find Tenten, because Tenten hadn't used that blade, thank god, and suddenly he falls to his hands and knees, gasping, because there is no energy left in him and he is tired, so tired, so tired.

* * *

In the end, it is Lee who finds and rescues Tenten. He had been supposed to run back to Konoha with the scroll in case the others ran into trouble, but Lee being Lee, he had seen the explosion set off by Tenten and ran off into enemy terrain instead, meeting Daichi along the way and sending him back to Konoha in his place with the scroll.

He helps Tenten limp out of the Iwa-nin's ravaged campsite, past the corpses that lie with their faces smashed in.

"Thanks, Lee," she says, smiling faintly at him through the bruises on her face. "You're the best."

Lee only grins back at her with his ANBU mask pushed up over his head, silently thankful that he had intervened before the Iwa-nin had gone too far in their interrogation.

"Where is Neji?" One of her ribs is broken, making talking difficult and painful.

Lee shakes his head. "I don't know."

"Is he – " Tenten bites her lip.

His hand is comforting on her back. "We'll find him."

* * *

Three days later they find Neji walking slowly through a shaded valley, a hand trailing along the rock walls to guide his way. His gait is steady and he is not badly injured, but there is something in the way he holds his head that tells them he is not seeing. Tenten limps towards him as fast as her broken ankle and rib will allow.

"Neji," she calls out as she nears, "it's me. Tenten. And Lee. Neji, we found you."

Neji had known who they were the moment he heard their voices in the distance. He stands very still as they make their way toward him, moving only to take off his bloodied ANBU mask. He feels the midday sun on his face. "Tenten," he says quietly, voice cracking in a way that only his teammates can perceive. "Lee."

"I am glad to see you alive, Neji." Lee's own voice is wobbly. He shakes himself, places a hand firmly on Neji's shoulder. "Let's go home."

Tenten wraps her arms around Neji with a carefulness and fragility that makes their hearts ache. Neji slides a hand to the curve of her back, raising the other to her face. His expression softens.

"Your hair –"

"Your eyes – "

They break off simultaneously, hesitant. Tenten suddenly finds that her cheek is wet. "How long have you been blind?"

"Four days. My byakugan burned out a few hours after you went missing." He had travelled blind for four days, heading north, guided by the memory of the light that had briefly seeped through the darkness. "But I saw the – the explosion." A pause. He lowers his voice. "I knew it was you."

A loud sniff. Tenten turns to find Lee watching them with huge, fat tears rolling down his face. "Oh, the springtime of youth!" he wails, spinning on his heels and running off bawling. Neji finds himself chuckling at Lee's idea of a tactful exit, and the familiarity of it is such a relief that it is almost painful.

Tenten smiles and Neji is startled when she pushes something gingerly into his hand. He rolls it around between his fingers. It is a small blade, coated on one side with dried ink. His breath hitches. He feels her fingers gently stroking the side of his face, the veins around his eyes. He leans into her touch, allowing relief to roll through his body like warmth.

"Does it still hurt?" she asks him softly.

He closes his eyes. In his mind he can still see the light in the sky, burning like a white star. "No," he says. He brings his hand to the back of her neck blindly, pulling her gently in to kiss her mouth. "Please don't cry, Tenten."

When he opens his eyes he finds unexpectedly that a few soft lines are emerging from the darkness before him, pale glimpses of the curve of a cheek, the gleam of wet lashes. He blinks. The lines solidify further. He breathes in slowly, exhales. Closes his eyes. Opens them again.

He can faintly make out most of Tenten's face now, the dip of her shoulders. She is smiling at him, sensing the change. Neji thinks that she has never looked more beautiful to him.

"Are you ready, Neji?"

He nods, unable to stop staring at her face. He had missed being able to see. He had missed being able to see her face.

She threads her fingers through his. "Let's go home."


End file.
